All the years that I’ve used a mac, I’ve been doing my programming on the mac
itself. OSX itself is a unix system, so that’s fine. And with macports (or fink or that other one that I’ve forgotten) I
can easily install the bunch of extra utilities that I need.

When I worked with plone, this worked really
well. The only external dependencies that you had to deal with were PIL (so:
libjpeg-dev and friends) and sometimes lxml’s libxslt/libxml
dependencies. Especially lxml could give you grief on OSX, but with the use of
the z3c.recipe.staticlxml recipe everything was
fine.

Django, which I work with now, is likewise
easy to install and develop for on OSX. That is, until you get to
geodjango. And we’re using a whole lot of geo stuff in our websites, so you
need a whole geo stack. Geos, gdal, mapnik. And often numpy and scipy. And
spatialite instead of the bundled-with-python sqlite.

All of this is just a big sudoapt-getinstall.... on ubuntu, but on OSX
it is grief. I managed to get it working most of the time:

I tried the kyngchaos packages
first. Collecting everything and getting everything working with the right
python versions was quite some work at the time. Perhaps it is easier
now. This worked for a while, but I kept having problems using other
libraries: those were often easier to install with macports or fink, but
then you used macports’ python instead of the system python used by
kyngchaos...

Fink. Installing works fine, but the packages were a bit old.

Macports. Currently the best way to get everything going, but I still ran
into some problems:

I couldn’t get spatialite to work. So I had to do all my work with
postgresql-with-postgis.

You install everything for python 2.7. Suddenly it turns out that
python-mapnik (iirc) is only available for 2.6. Alrighty, let’s do it all
again.

Update to mountain lion. Oh, xyxwidkcygxy, I have to de-install macports
and install everything again from start!

Update to mountain lion. Oh, my postgres server disappeared. Did I install
that from the postgres installer? Or from macports? Oh, and I have to
install all those postgis templates again.

Solution: use vagrant to quickly get a
decently-set-up ubuntu virtual machine inside virtualbox. Now I get to use the
regular ubuntu packages and everything Just Works.

In a later blog post I’ll tell you how I set it up. This one’s long enough
already :-)